If content is king in your business then you may be looking at sourcing a much more powerful CMS solution. This would apply to you if you are running a content portal serving say amateur athletes or mobile phone enthusiasts. If this is the case then publishing multiple articles on a daily basis is going to be vital. Of equal importance will be controlling and archiving this content as it comes in from numerous authors.

You may possibly charge for access, membership or subscription to certain premium content / features on your content managed site, so registration is a feature you might be investigating. Another element of your site might be developing a community of users through bulletin boards, forums and recruitment postings. If this is similar to your business model it may even be that you are building an affiliates network and placing banner adverts on your site.

It is for these content-driven business models that full content management systems come in to their own. There is a list of features below that reveals some of the powerful functionality that a quality CMS can offer. In particular, you should look at the Management and Built-in Applications as you will need to match these with your own requirements. Many CMS make full use of PayPal to support revenue generation, so check whether the modules you are after can be based on a payment model.

The features listed can be associated with expensive software from vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Vignette, Blue Martini and others. Potentially, you are looking to invest five figure sums in your CMS, but if you are trying to be much more economical there are still plenty of low cost CMS to be found with most of this functionality. CMS seems to be one area that Open Source developers have really progressed in, so if you are prepared to work through the slightly more complex hosting set-up and learning curve of Open Source, you could pick up all the features for free!